The Trouble with Bubbles

When Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Chair and longtime icon of the free market, testified last October before the House Oversight Committee on the current financial crisis, he did something that he had not done much very much in his 18 glorious years as the head of the Fed: say “Oops.”

The 82-year-old acknowledged that he had made a mistake in believing that the nation’s banks, operating in their own self-interest, would adequately protect their shareholders and avoid unreasonable risks in the financial markets. Such economic decision-making, made possible through lax regulation and low interest rates that Mr. Greenspan once endorsed but is now shying away from, was, as he put it, “a flaw in the model that defines how the world works.” Indeed, Mr. Greenspan’s world doesn’t seem to be making much sense as it once did. [Read more]

As a vehicle for pro-life propaganda, Juno is a Trojan horse. It won over liberal hearts, and somehow managed to smuggle in its conservative baggage. It is not, as accommodating film critic Roger Ebert suggested, a masterpiece. The only thing it does masterfully is conceal it’s fundamentalism from moderate audiences. For that, it deserves recognition.

“These people” are Guantanamo inmates, and Berlin’s Senator for the Interior, Ehrhart Körting, is not a fan. They went to Afghanistan believing it to be the promised land, the Social Democratic Senator told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, at a time when the stoning of women was a common occurrence. “It speaks volumes as to mindset of these people, even if you can’t proof they’ve engaged in terrorist activities.” Körting added himself to a growing list of German politicians who debated whether to admit some of the soon to be released Gitmo detainees into Germany.

If it wasn’t shiningly clear before, being in the midst of the streets of Washington DC on Inauguration Day firmly established one thing: Barack Obama has become a cult personality and, as a consequence, the world’s hottest commercial brand.

It took the new media team of now finally President Barack Obama only minutes to move into their new virtual home—www.whitehouse.gov. While the new President was still delivering his Inaugural adress, his web2.0 workers already published the first new post on the President’s official domain. [Read more]

Soon to be inaugurated President-elect Barack Obama might make a comeback to Berlin, the German weekly Focusreports. And this time it might be nothing less than the Brandenburger Tor for Germany’s favorite US President since the days of JFK. [Read more]

German Finanzminister Peer Steinbrück is interviewed in the recent Newsweek issue, and he doesn’t sound too happy:

Doesn’t an unprecedented crisis call for unprecedented measures?“It’s the yearning for the Great Rescue Plan. It doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist! Dealing with an unprecedented crisis is a puzzle, a trial-and-error.”

Desperate times call for desperate measures, apparently. That is what the Liberal Party, the New Democratic Party and the Bloc Québécois seem to believe. Out of nowhere, Canada is on its way to a coalition government – a constellation not seen since WWI. And there’s drama, too!